6.2: Solving the "Problem" of Emotion Through Situated Feeling

In Chapter Two, I treated situated knowing and feeling separately in order to develop a theory of situated knowledge for the feminist contemplative writing classroom; however, this separation is more reflective of the linear nature of a book than it is an indication of their status as separate faculties around which we can draw definitive lines. Contemplative approaches, in seeing education and learning as embodied, recognize that “full comprehension that arises as the fruit of contemplative pedagogy is not a remote, abstract, intellectual knowledge, but a form of beholding (theoria) that is fully embodied, which means that it entails aesthetic and moral dimensions as well as cognitive ones” (Zajonc, 2010, p. 91). To privilege the materiality of emotion as that which charges our flesh with agency, I move to define feeling in terms similar to those I used to define knowing in the last chapter. The overlap is unavoidable when we understand feeling and knowing as companion composers²⁰ of situated knowledge. If our knowledge is shaped just as much by our embodied feeling as our thinking, we must pay attention to both as creative forces in our writing. Building on Chapter Two’s discussion of situated knowledge as that which gets made on the page and in the classroom in contemplative writing pedagogy, I am interested in seeing emotions as “situated feelings,” marked by their corporeality as well as their social positioning, which creates and reflects the web of material situatedness from which we write. Parsing the definition of situated knowledge in light of this chapter’s focus on emotion entails seeing situated knowledge as comprised of the two inexorably tied processes of situated thinking and situated feeling. An embrace of the material via this feminist contemplative epistemology brings the fleshy person back into view and testifies to her role in the construction of what is thought and felt. Situated feeling provides a theoretical model with which to counter the negative treatment of emotion in our lore-driven practices, as demonstrated in the last section, and a means of increasing our limited vocabulary of emotion in composition studies.

To review, Haraway defines situated knowledge as a feminist epistemology based on “particular and specific embodiment”²¹ (1991c, p. 190) so that the body as an epistemic origin is seen to produce “partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the possibility of webs of connection” in meaning making (1991c. p. 191). It is worth repeating the differences between understanding knowing and feeling through the lens of feminist situated knowledge as I do here instead of claiming a mainstream, postmodern situatedness, as has become routine among compositionists. As we’ve moved toward postmodern definitions of situatedness as the contingency surrounding all meaning, based on our placement in discursive systems that structure what and how we know, our pedagogies have typically closed out matter. Keeping a tension between mainstream constructivism and pedagogical alternatives, expressivists like Elbow and Lad Tobin have championed personal knowledge as a product of the individual in the world, but they tend to see this individual in terms of his/her psyche, too easily disconnecting the mind from the body.

Haraway’s version of feminist situated knowledge deserves our attention for the ways it strikes a balance between pedagogies that rely too heavily on the exclusion of the “personal” for the social or vice versa, moving beyond inattention to the body. Situatedness from a Haraway-ian lens mediates: both the social construction of knowledge as well as the embodiment of our meaning making is taken into account. We aren’t searching for the truth of the psyche or of the text but instead for responsible local knowledge that doesn’t remove the knower from the known or cancel out the possibility of meaning outside the text. Attention to situatedness is meant to underscore just how central our embodied experience is; how knowledge, like the body, is always locatable and always partial. Indeed, situated knowledge rests on the subject’s fleshiness, on her inherent embodiment as part of the organic world. Embodiment in this formulation takes on the meaning of “dynamically embedded” not “statically bound.” Haraway defines situated knowledges as “marked knowledges” (1991c, p. 111) meaning that they are projects of knowing from the “somewhere” of the embodied subject as opposed to the “nowhere” of traditional empiricism or the “everywhere” of postmodernism (1991c, pp. 188-191). Alternately, Haraway advocates a strong embodiment in which the body is not just a window for knowing the world but is the map that structures our mapping of the world. We might even say that embodiment is knowing in this contemplative paradigm.

Embodiment is also feeling. The web-making process of situated knowing is one of “passionate construction” according to Haraway and “resonance, not … dichotomy” (1991c, pp. 194-195). As a critical and reflexive practice, situated knowledge thereby enacts what has been conventionally referred to as connected knowing in feminist literature. Sociologist Belenky defines connected knowing as “involv[ing] feeling, because it is rooted in relationship … [but also] involv[ing] thought” (Belenky, et al. 1973, p. 121). Because it invites feeling and sees emotion as critical and necessary to meaning, connected knowing advocates the epistemological stance of the “passionate knower” (1991c, p. 141). The passionate knower is a version of the embodied imaginer, or one engaged in situated knowing and feeling; one who is critical and emotional at the same time, recognizing that it is impossible to rise above the material self.

In exercising both mindfulness of her means of creating knowledge and the ways that knowledge ties her to others, the writer who takes on the role of embodied imaginer navigates a problem-solving context in which current emotional states, levels of motivation and perceptions of control are constantly being assessed through the introspective and reflective application of metacognition. The most recent educational research recognizes that affect and metacognition are bound together in much the same ways I am arguing that body and mind and feeling and knowing are linked in the contemplative. Preceding evaluative judgments of learning and knowing, “metacognitive feelings inform the person about a feature of cognitive processing, but they do it in an experiential way, that is, in the form of a feeling, such as feeling of knowing, feeling of confidence” (Efklides, 2006, p. 5). Writers who reflect on their learning between drafts of the same paper, for instance, do not do so in a cool and calculated way. They may ask themselves questions like, “How well am I understanding my audience’s needs?”, only to find that they are producing more writer-based than reader-based prose. Whether or not this becomes a moment of frustration and defeat in which the writer gives up or one of hopeful challenge in which the writer faces the problem with motivation and confidence in her ability to work through the recognized issue is feeling-laden. As I explore in the next interchapter, oftentimes, a writer’s ability to be aware of her body’s reaction to such a reflective process is key to her consciously processing the impact of her feelings on her writing process and using those feelings toward positive change and outcomes. As I will show there, if she can use her breath to work through the tensions of problem-solving, she may perceive her control of the situation to be greater than if she is unaware of this embodied tension.

Here, I’d like to focus on how the embodied imaginer, who understands meaning-making through the lens of situated knowledge, is summarily engaged in a process of situated thinking and feeling. In this contemplative process, it is understood that:

• Feeling is seen as an agentive force of the body, not simply a rhetorical construct and therefore not entirely reducible to language even if it is reciprocally shaped by it.
• The body is the origin of both feeling as well as thinking. Both processes must be interwoven to create responsible, local knowledge.
• Our understanding of feeling is primarily experiential but our common embodiment, which can be seen as a promising and productive “limitation,” produces certain schemas of emotion that are shared so that we can connect to others. Thus, it makes sense to talk about the interaction of bodies and cultures wherein both shape each other.
• Situated feeling establishes a “webbed” orientation that allows for the creation of connected knowledge, which rejects traditional modes of detachment and seeks to relate the material and discursive at the level of meaning and enact it at the level of our bodies.
• As such, situated feeling prompts one to understand one’s limits and one’s partial perspective, encouraging a recognition of embodied difference and the need to build coalitions among others differentially positioned.

As these five central premises of situated feeling show, definitions of situated knowledge from the last chapter are not balanced unless they account for the enmeshment of feeling and thinking. Situated knowledges are, in part, marked by feeling since they both place us in a material body and spatialize us in the world. Situated feeling highlights the ways materiality and discursivity are yoked in circles of meaning, making it impossible and particularly senseless to separate them. We are left, then, with a view of emotion as equally embedded in the organic body as in culture, or as situated in both material and semiotic worlds. Viewing emotion through situated feeling necessitates that we give up the closure of defining it as entirely linguistic or natural. It similarly hampers any attempts to define emotion, feeling, or affect separately, encouraging my interchangeable use of these terms.

I choose “situated feeling” instead of alternatives like Laura Micciche’s more performative “rhetorics of emotion” (2007) because the latter too often establishes the body as a discursive marker, denying its agentive materiality. Despite a weaker focus on the body than I am calling for, Micciche has done much recent work in composition studies to make emotions visible and intelligible, and her book Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching makes as an exciting counterstatement to a mainstream alignment of emotion with persuasive, pathetic appeals in line with classical rhetoric’s valuative positioning of pathos beneath logos and ethos—despite its seeming equal weight among the rhetorical appeals. Aligning emotion with a social sense of “doing” leads Micciche to differentiate “emoting,” which she defines as the individual expression of feeling, from “rhetorics of emotion,” or “emotion as a performative that produces effects. To speak of emotion as performative is to foreground the idea that emotions are enacted and embodied in the social world … [and that] we do emotions—they don’t simply happen to us” (2007, pp. 1-2). It is with the latter, the doing of emotion, that Micciche is concerned.

Micciche’s work raises fruitful questions about how contemplative writing pedagogies might take up the meaning-making potential of situated feeling. While not aligning her work with embodiment as directly as I am, Micciche acknowledges the connection between research on emotion and the body, citing neurobiological evidence that we come to know our emotions by the ways in which we embody and experience them (2007, p. 19). Research on both bodies and feelings therefore often share similar exigencies. Consequently, what binds Micciche’s and my undertaking of emotion is the need to address emotion’s fullness, seeing it not simply as a way to move an audience (a persuasive aim) but also as a dynamic motor of meaning (a generative process). When viewed as a situated act, emotion’s meaning and value for writing need not be understood in a strictly personal sense, and it can therefore be understood as teachable and necessary for critical narratives and metacognitive insight.

Micciche is as resistant to understanding emotion simply as a quality of the private mind as I am, since it is this kind of “commonsense” view that has led to emotion’s devaluation. For this author, our understanding of emoting as an ineffable, private expression of feeling has blinded us to the relational conception of emotion as circulation. It is the concept of emotion as private that propels the lore evident in the personal example I used to frame this chapter and leads Bartholomae to argue that expressivism, the pedagogy historically most aligned with the validation of feeling in writing, promotes sentimental realism by encouraging writers to see their compositions as “true stor[ies] of what [they] think, feel, know and see” (1990, p. 69).²² Whether or not the body is our focus, we must begin to see feeling as both social and personal if we wish to reanimate our studies of it and hope for its inclusion in our pedagogies.

Micciche understands emotions as “emerging relationally, in encounters between people, so that emotion takes form between bodies rather than residing in them” (2007, p. 13). A relational, constitutive understanding of emotion underscores it as a rhetorical “technology for doing” (2007, p. 14) as opposed to a private reaction or a persuasive tool for consumption and not production. Micciche uses the view of emotion as circulation, “emotion takes form between bodies rather than residing in them” (2007, p. 13) to avoid the privatization of emotion that constructivists target. Resisting the view of emotions as tools used to manipulate reason, Micciche instead forwards a notion of emotions as constructive acts of meaning by drawing from Sarah Amhed’s work on emotions in politics.

To understand what sets Micciche’s approach apart from the classical canon of work on emotion, the distinction to press is the way emotions are here seen as always present, acting as constructors of meaning by binding individuals together in economies of value. Emotions, as such, are not simply passive tools of provocation. We cannot choose to “add in” emotions since they are always already present making meaning and shaping values, bodies and beliefs—whether or not we attend to these dynamics. For her, what we have failed to see is how the performance of emotion is what connects individuals in social groups, making feelings powerful measures of group realities. Micciche calls the effects of emotion’s relational circulation “stickiness” after Ahmed. Stickiness accounts for the ways signs are positioned as objects of feeling so that they accumulate specific, affective values which attach to them through narratives and discursive structures like metaphor (2007, p. 27). The term takes on a webbing conception connecting the individual who feels to a larger network of material subjects and objects by the web-spinning of language as it works like a spider.

I have no desire to argue against the social construction of emotion or to conceive of emotion as ineffable, since I am working within a model of situatedness myself, but Micciche’s primary focus on the social body over the individual body marks the point at which our approaches diverge as she goes to rhetorics of emotion and I to situated feeling. In making the claim of sticky relationality within rhetorics of emotion, Micciche strives to underscore the ways in which we perform feelings based on certain cultural scripts or feeling rules and casts her lot with the group over the individual per se. For her, the performance of emotion as socially saturated is where the hope for transformation lies. This is plainly evident in Micciche’s instructive example of how emotions bind together individuals into a social body when she turns to the ways composition’s identity metaphors attach particular emotional valences to the field.

In particular, Micciche explores the negative emotions of subjection, what Wendy Brown calls a “wound culture,” as that which binds together the theory, the practice and the teachers within composition (2007, p. 28). Micciche’s point is that composition’s emotioned response, which is a central feature of its rhetoric of subjection, reproduces its marginalization in a cycle that might be understood as a self-fulfilling prophecy. To break this destructive cycle, Micciche claims we need a new emotional identity for our field and offers the process model of “performative composition” which derives from Butler’s notion of gender as a repeated performance of “stylized acts” which solidify into an identity that seems natural (2007, p. 44).

Micciche’s stake in the performance of emotion takes its cue from Butler’s definition of gender. For Butler, gender is “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (1999, p. 177). Gender is not “in” us but is rather an externalized effect: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (1999, p. 33). If, like our gender identity, composition’s identity as wounded only appears innate, but is rather naturalized through certain performances, there is room to remake the field and thereby invite new performances and positive understandings of its emotional culture. Through our emotions, compositionists have the power to adhere to the affective status quo or to take action and reenergize our emotional metaphors, thereby changing the social dynamics of the field. The bulk of Micciche’s book consequently focuses on composition’s current emotional culture and the ways in which it can be re-envisioned, offering much constructive criticism along the way.

However, as I explored in Chapter One, when Butler extends her performance theory to sex, the body becomes a sign emptied of its materiality.²³ To testify to the social construction of sex, Butler encourages us to see matter as “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface” (1993, p. 26). The body therefore becomes more a sign or “effect” than a real physical presence. While I share Micciche’s desire to move from a cognitive model of emotion as interiority, I believe shifting to exteriority disallows the body’s hold on emotion and thus devalues situated feeling as I have defined it. Within feminism, I go to Haraway precisely because she refuses to etherealize the body. Even if we read Micciche generously so that the body does not entirely disappear, it does seem to acquire the status of yet another “object of feeling” that accumulates sticky affect rather than produces it, so that the body is often better understood as a stage for the performance than an agent of it.

So while I find useful her conceptualization of emotion as sticky circulation, the trouble spot for me in Micciche’s definition of emotion is the binary established by her placement of “rather:” again, “emotion takes form between bodies rather than residing in them” (2007, p. 13, emphasis added). This binary is reflected in her desire to divorce emoting from rhetorics of emotion, a division I find unnecessary since there is no analytic of emotion, no performance of feeling, without individual bodies emoting; the personal body’s expression and shaping of feeling must occur within rhetorics of emotion or we would have nothing to analyze since our linguistic and conceptual schemas of emotion most certainly rest on our physical experiences of them. Situated feeling, as I have conceived of it with Haraway’s help, provides an alternative that generates a fuller analytic of feeling, which sees emotion as residing in bodies as well as moving between and among them. In sum, it recaptures the presence of the contemplative writing body, the writing yogi, a term I fully explain in Chapter One.

Placing emotion only between bodies may work to uncover a construction of affective meaning in social groups like the discipline of composition studies, but it seems less helpful in developing a praxis of contemplative writing wherein the individual expression of situated writing bodies is equally as important to the making and exploration of meaning through composing as it is to understanding collective, affective economies in the classroom. Micciche’s focus on the topdown circulation of emotion may avoid the essentialist charge, but it also seems to place more emphasis on discursive, rhetorical movement than sticky bodies as agents of rhetoric themselves. For instance, the emphasis on social bodies overagainst individual bodies, which rhetorizes rather than actualizes flesh, is supported by Micciche’s proposed classroom activities such as when students are asked to read and record a section of a teacher-chosen text where emotioned language seems present. Students then record and perform this section for classmates, opening class dialogue on the movement of emotion, thereby unearthing the stickiness of emotion as it pulses through texts and between the bodies of writers, readers and audiences at large (Micciche, 2007, p. 58).²⁴

What this activity teaches students about the construction of identity in the production of emotion is certainly valuable, but the student’s own writing body, her feeling center, seems lost here for the performance of the author’s. Rather than using only the projected personae of authors, in contemplative pedagogy, students would be just as likely to read their own written texts. Such reading could lead to productive discussions about how emotion is flexibly situated depending on the reading and the reception of a text. This practice could show how our reading is also contingent on the emotion that “stuck” to the original composition by the way of style, tone, language and even the embodied memory of the writing to which the author is privy; it might also reveal an unexpected disruption, creating emotional dissonance for the author of the text which may or may not be felt by other readers. Another option might be for us to engage students in an embodied and experiential analysis of their emotions as they relate to their understanding of how their writing selves are created. Amy Winans describes a potential activity in her article advocating contemplative pedagogies within literature classes that engage students in an examination of difference and a questioning of privilege. Indeed, she argues that we must attend to emotional literacy if we ask students to confront difference in our courses. Winans sees contemplative practice as a means of engaging students in analytical and experiential engagements with their emotions toward the end of developing critical emotional awareness (2012, p. 152). Winans asks students to “spend ten minutes outside of class standing in a public place doing nothing—without pretending to be doing something (waiting, checking a phone, people watching, looking for something” and to write a paper about that experience (2012, p. 160). This contemplative activity is meant to promote students’ analysis of silence and any emotions of discomfort caused by engaging directly in experience without distraction. Winans concludes that such contemplative practice both allows students to feel the way their identity shifts in their interactions (or lack thereof) with others and also how their bodies are implicated in emotional responses. With this recognition comes the responsibility to analyze emotions that result from habitual thinking and the responsibility to recognize how our emotional states can impact the ways we can make and interpret meaning from experience (Winans, 2012, p. 161). Contemplative exercises like these can show students that there is movement and stickiness in situated feeling but that there are also times of dynamic rest in positioned bodies; that feeling isn’t just in language, it is also in bodies.

To argue for both is in line with contemplative embodiment. Contemplative philosophy and feminist theory together provide us a theory of situated knowledge in which the body is not just a stage on which cultural scripts like gender are played but is more like a sage actor who improvises as much as she follows a script, changing the play as it unfolds. By adding situated feeling to this theory, we can see that we simply could not conceive of emotions if we did not first perceive them as residing inside us and as essential to the ways in which our fleshy bodies navigate the world. Our experiences of embodiment include both interiority and exteriority, reminding us that feelings can be viewed as part of the body’s extralingustic agency without negating the role our culture has to play in our shaping. Recognizing the body’s role encourages us to learn to develop an awareness that speaks with the body and not always for it.